EDWARD EVERETT HALEEDWARD EVERETT HALEON ROXBURY HEIGHTS, BOSTON
EDWARD EVERETT HALE
The pulpit of Boston—what a fellowship of goodly names the phrase recalls! Knotty old stub-twist Cotton Mather,
“With his wonderful inkhorn at his side”;
saintly Ellery Channing; courtly Edward Everett; soaring Emerson; sledge-hammer Beecher,père; Parker, the New England Luther; golden-mouthed Starr King; mystic, Oriental Weiss; Freeman Clarke—steady old “Saint James”; Father Taylor, the Only; quaint, erratic Bartol, the last of the Transcendentalists; impetuous Phillips Brooks; and manly, practical Everett Hale. Can you measure the light they have spread around—its range, its brilliancy? The Christian pulpit of Boston has been a diadem of light to half the world. It has been distinctively not an ecclesiastical, but a patriotic, educational, and intellectual force. Yet, out of the whole cluster of preacher-authors, one can strictly claim for literature only our American Kingsley—Edward Everett Hale. It is not so much by warrantof his studies in Spanish history that we class him among theliterati—although in some degree he has proved the successor of Prescott in this field, and has lately prepared “The Story of Spain” for Putnam’s Nations Series; but it is in virtue of his novels, his help-stories for young folks, and his books of travel.
Mr.Hale’s home is in Roxbury (the “Highland” region), five-minutes’ ride, by steam car, from the heart of Boston. “Rocksbury,” as it was spelled in the old documents, is a rocky and craggy place, as its name indicates. If you are curious to know where the rocks came from, just turn toDr.Holmes’s “Dorchester Giant,” and read about that plum-pudding, as big as the State House dome, which was demolished by the giant’s wife and screaming boys:
“They flung it over to Roxbury hills,They flung it over the plain,And all over Milton and Dorchester tooGreat lumps of pudding the giants threw;They tumbled as thick as rain.”
Speaking of rocks, there is still to be seen, hardly a stone’s-throw beyondMr.Hale’s residence, a natural Cyclopean wall—sheer, somber, Dantesque, overgrown with wilding shrubs, the rocks cramped and locked together in the joints and interspaces by the contorted roots of huge black and scarlet oaks, which, directly theyemerge from the almost perpendicular cliff, turn and shoot straight up toward the zenith. On the summit of these rocks is the Garrison residence, presented to the anti-slavery agitator by his admirers, and now the home of his son,Mr.Francis J. Garrison. Other neighbors ofMr.Hale are William Lloyd Garrison, Jr., and the venerable Charles K. Dillaway, President of the Boston Latin School Association, and master of the school fifty years ago, when young Hale was conjugating his τύπτω τύφω on its old teetering settees.Mr.Dillaway bears his years well, and recently celebrated his golden wedding. They have a well-combed and fruity look, these old walled and terraced lawns and gardens of steep Roxbury Height. In the Loring, the Hallowell, and the Auchmuty houses, and in Shirley Hall, there yet remain traces of the slave-holding Puritan aristocracy of two centuries ago. The Hale residence, by its old-time hugeness and architectural style, seems as if it ought to be storied in a double sense; but it really has no history other than that which its present occupant is giving it. It is none too large for one who has seen grow up in it a family of five sons and a daughter,—none too large (if one may judge from the plethoric library) for its owner’s ever-growing collection of books and manuscripts. The house, which is of a cream color with salmon facings, is set backfrom the street some fifty feet, affording a small front lawn, divided from the sidewalk by a row of trees. The second-story front windows are beneath the roof of the great Doric porch, and between the pillars of this porch clamber the five-leaved woodbine and the broad-leaved aristolochia, or Dutchman’s pipe. It is characteristic ofMr.Hale that he supports in his Roxbury home an old, an almost decrepit man-servant, who has lived with him for half a lifetime, and may be, for all I know, the original of “My Double.” A picture of this “Old Retainer” was exhibited byMr.Hale’s daughter this year in the Paris Salon, over the title of “A New England Winter.” I may, perhaps, be pardoned for mentioning, in this connection, that Mrs. Hale is, on the mother’s side, a Beecher—the niece of Henry Ward Beecher—and inherits the moral enthusiasm of that religious family.
To return toMr.Hale. As for his library, it may be said that, like his own exterior, his thinking-shop is plain and little adorned. It is his nacre shell lined with the fair pearl of his thought. The room is just back of one of the large front drawing-rooms, and “gives” upon a littlecul-de-sacof a side-street. It is a small room, and is crammed with plain bookshelves and cases of drawers. In this room most ofMr.Hale’s writing is done. He has a good collection of booksand maps relating to Spanish-American subjects. Among these is afac-simileof Cortez’s autograph map of Lower California, made forMr.Hale by order of the Spanish Government from the original copy preserved in the national archives.
Mr.Hale being, by his own frequent confessions, the most terribly be-bored man in the universe, and having always had a hankering after Sybaritic islands where map-peddlers, book agents, and pious beggars might never mark his flight to do him wrong, it seemed providential, in a twofold sense, that a wealthy friend in Roger Williams’s city, the writer of a work on the labor question, should have carried out the brilliant idea of building the hard-worked author a summer retreat in the soft sea-air of Rhode Island. For the dreary romance of the Newport region—its vast, warm, obliterating Gulf Stream fogs, and the crusty lichens that riot and wax fat in the moisty strength thereof, the warm tints of rock and sky, naiad caves and tangled wrack and shell, and reveries by fire of flotage wood—you must peep into Colonel Higginson’s “Oldport Days” orMr.Hale’s “Christmas in Narragansett.” The latter book is full of charming description and autobiographical chit-chat. Manuntuck, where for twelve years the Hales have summered, is a little hamlet to the south of Newport and far down on the opposite side of the bay. It is sixor eight miles from anywhere; it is almost at the jumping-off point; if the organizer of charities gets there, he will either have to walk or hire a team. The real southern limit of New England, according toMr.Hale, is formed by a certain “long comb of little hills, of which the ends are gray stones separate from each other.” On a high ridge of these hills is Colonel Ingham’s cottage. In front of the house is the geological beach, about a mile and a half wide. In good weather Montauk Point—the end of Long Island—is visible, as is also Gay’s Head on Martha’s Vineyard. Just back of the house is a lovely lake, and further back are other lakes bordered by swamps filled with pink and white rhododendrons, and many plants interesting to botanists. It is the region dwelt in of old by the Narragansett Indians. The swamp where in 1675 the great battle was fought is not far away. The Indians called the region Pettaquamscut.
Mr.Hale is not reserved about himself in his books. But in his fictitious writings you must beware of taking him too literally. He hates to wear his heart upon his sleeve. When you imagine that at last he is standing before youin propriâ personâ—whish! he claps on his magic cap, with a thimbleful of fern-seed sewed in it, and fades from your sight or recognition. He has recently told us of his habits of work, and how hesleeps and eats. What he says goes far toward explaining how he can throw off such amazing quantities of work. A man who eats five times a day, sleeps nine hours (including, with tolerable regularity, an hour after dinner), and takes plenty of out-door exercise, can perform as much as half a dozen dyspeptic, half-starved night-moths.Mr.Hale, it seems, does his writing and thinking in the lump, working his way regularly by a dead lift of three hours a day—inclusive, often, of a half or a full hour’s bout before breakfast—the early work based upon aFrühstückof coffee and biscuit. Another secret of his power to produce work is his habit of getting others, especially young people, to work for him. For at least thirteen years he has employed an amanuensis for a part of his writings. If he wishes to edit, in compact shape, certain hearty and relishing old narratives, he sets his young friends to reading for him, and by their joint labors the work is done. His “Family Flight” series of travels (which we are given to understand has been quite successful) is the joint work of himself and his traveled sister. In short, he takes all the help he can get, printed or personal, for whatever writing he has on hand.Mr.Hale takes his exercise chiefly by walking, or in the horse-cars, as business or professional duty calls him hither and thither. As a hunger-producer the average suburban horse-carline of Boston is scarcely excelled by a corduroy road or a mud avenue of New Orleans; and the bracing sea-air of the Boston Highlands adds its whet and stimulant.
When a young man of eighteen, Hale had the same fluent speech, the same gift of telling, impromptu oratory, that makes him to-day so much sought after as the spokesman of this cause and that. He likes to be at a meeting of the Massachusetts Historical Society, or the Oriental Society at Worcester, but finds it not profitable or possible regularly to attend clubs or ministers’ meetings. Like the two earthenware pots floating down the stream of Æsop’s fable, there are inMr.Hale’s nature two clashing master-traits—the social, humanitarian, and democratic instinct, and the dignified reserve and exclusiveness of the Edward Everett strain in his blood. He is a tremendous social magnet turning now its attracting and now its repelling pole to the world; to-day bringing comfort and hope to a score of drowning wretches, and to-morrow barricading himself in his study and sending off to the printer passionate and humorous invectives against the ineffable brood of the world’s bores. It is naturally, therefore, a rather formidable matter for a stranger to get access to the penetralia of the Roxbury mansion.
A certain lady friend ofMr.Hale’s was muchdisturbed by the above statement when it first appeared inThe Critic. She affirms that the Doctor is a very approachable man. The following quotation from a letter of her niece (who, out of friendship forMr.Hale, gives part of her time to helping him in his work) certainly seems irrefutable testimony in her favor:—“I was atMr.Hale’s to-day from eleven to one o’clock. He receives an immense number of letters on all sorts of subjects, particularly charity undertakings, and we register them for him (I with three other girls) in a blank-book, so that he can refer to them at any time. He is very methodical; he is, indeed, a wonderful man, and you can realize the vast amount of work he does, by sitting an hour in the room with him and hearing ring after ring at the front door. One man wants a place as coachman; then comes a woman wishing a letter of introduction; and I could fill a page with the different requests, all listened to with so much patience, and immediately attended to.” Yet I know of a man who called five times in the vain endeavor to seeMr.Hale and get him to marry him. At last, in his despair, he went to a friend of the “Colonel’s,” a lady who bravely volunteered to storm the castle in the prospective bridegroom’s behalf. She effected her object by calling with the couple at six o’clock in the morning,yet felt sure she got a masterly beshrewing for her pains!
Mr.Hale’s plain dressing is said to be something of a grievance to certain well-meaning members of his congregation, but it is an indispensable part of his personality, and is, I doubt not, adopted for moral example as much as from inherent dislike of show and sham. I have a picture in my mind now ofMr.Hale as I saw him crossing the Harvard College yard, one Commencement Day, in a by-no-means glossy suit of black, and wearing the inevitable soft slouch hat. A work-worn, weary, and stooping figure it was, the body slightly bent, as if from supporting such a weight of head. There are certain photographs of Hale in which I see the powerful profile of Huntington, the builder of the Central Pacific Railroad.
Mr.Hale believes in the American people most heartily, and holds them to have been always in advance of their political leaders. He is full of plans for social betterments and the discomfiture of the devil’s regiments of the line. In fact he has too much of this kind of flax on his distaff for his own good. One of his hobbies being cheap and good literature for the people, he is thoroughly in sympathy with the Chautauqua system of popular instruction. He delivered an address at the Framingham meeting not very long ago,and is one of the Counselors of the Literary and Scientific Circle. His idea of popular instruction is in some respects fully realized in this great Chautauqua organization, with its grove and Hall of Philosophy, its Assembly, its annual reunions, and central and local reading-circles affording to each of its thousands of readers the college-student’s general outlook upon the world. Speaking ofMr.Hale’s democratic sympathies, it is worthy of record here that when Walt Whitman published his first quarto, and the press in general was howling with derision over that remarkable trumpet-blast, Edward Everett Hale discovered the stamp of genius and manly power in it, and reviewed it favorably inThe North American Review. (It must be remembered that the first quarto of Whitman did not include the poems on sex. These were of later production.) It is characteristic of him that he has said that although he has not seen that notice since its appearance in theReviewin 1856, he thinks he would nevertheless stand by every word of it to-day.
W. S. Kennedy.
[Within a year or twoDr.Hale has resigned his duties of pastor to Prof. Edward Cummings of Harvard University, and is free to enjoy the life of busy leisure which he has so richly earned.—Editors.]